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Tuesday, August 25, 2015

After two months of
more serious titles, I thought it would be fun to try something a little
lighter and with an emphasis on humor. From my list of suggestions, the group
selected two of my favorite titles: The Amazing Maurice and His Educated
Rodents by Terry Pratchett and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas
Adams.

I promise to offer up
some more brain-straining titles next month!

Both books are now
available on the Nooks

The Amazing Maurice
and His Educated Rodents by Terry Pratchett

On
Discworld life is never quite what it seems.

At
first glance, Maurice is your typical rodent-eating moggie, but too many days
spent on the rubbish dump outside the Unseen University have made him a little
unique. Maurice is a talking cat who has recruited a bunch of equally
loquacious rats and a dumb kid, called Keith, to ‘pull the pied piper trick’ on
unsuspecting villages. All is proceeding smoothly: widdling rats . . .
screaming peasants . . . a boy and his cat arriving just at the right time to
lure the plague away . . .

Then
they reach Bad Blintz and Maurice is faced by a strange absence of normal rats
and rat-catchers waiving bootlaces and claiming that the town is overrun with
rodents. Can Maurice save the rats and escape with some of his nine lives
intact?

The Hitchhiker’s
Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

It
begins as just another normal day for Arthur Dent and then everything goes
wrong.

A
demolition team arrives with the news that his house lies along the route of
the new bypass, which is more than a little annoying, but then a large fleet of
interstellar aircraft arrive to relay the exact same news to the rest of the
planet. Oh, the irony!

Follow
Arthur on his bizarre adventures through the universe armed only with his
trusty towel and the most invaluable book ever written: The Hitchhiker’s Guide
to the Galaxy. Discover the ‘wonders’ of Vogon poetry, the strange but massively
useful Babel fish, an android with a brain the size of a planet and the reason why mice always look so smug.

We have just been told
that the library will be closing completely from November 16th into early
January. This will allow the new staircase to be installed and give us a block
of time to fit the new cataloging chips to all the items in the collections.

Unfortunately, this
means that I have to cancel the NYOBG meeting that I had scheduled for December
10th. Once I have a firm date for the reopening I will select dates for January
through to May and let you know.

Tuesday, August 11, 2015

‘Scout’
Finch lives in a sleepy Southern town in the 1930s. She and her older brother,
Jem, spend their days as most children do: getting into trouble and trying to
make sense of the world around them. Their widowed father, Atticus, is a very
hands-off parent, who treats them both like adults and stimulates their ability
to think and make moral judgments for themselves. Their female parenting is
mostly provided by the housekeeper, Calpurnia, with a little help from their
aunt and some of the neighbors. Further stimulus is added by the yearly visit
of their friend Dill, who is wildly entertaining and deceitful. The three
children are obsessed by the creepy house next door, which shelters the
supposedly terrifying Boo Radley, a person that they are determined to meet.

We
follow Scout over several summers as she begins to understand the inequalities
of the world around her. Her childish belief in truth and decency is severely
tested by the case of Tom Robinson, whom her father is assigned to defend. Tom
is accused of raping and beating a local girl, but his guilt or innocence is
irrelevant because he is black. The case tears Scout’s world apart, mirroring
the way it divides the town, leading to an unexpectedly violent and shocking
conclusion.

* * * * *

My
previous experience with a Pulitzer Prize winner was a slog through The Grapes
of Wrath when I was at high school. I have to admit that I was probably not old
enough to appreciate the writing, nor did I have any experience of the type of
poverty described, so it was mostly wasted upon me at the time. Having read
Miss Lee’s masterpiece, I feel much more inclined to revisit Steinbeck now that
I have aged somewhat and gained a little perspective.

It
is very rare for me to refer to a title as a masterpiece, but I feel that the
term is highly appropriate in this case. From the very first paragraph I knew
that I was reading a work of the highest quality, a feeling that I very
rarely get when I begin a book: it usually takes a little longer for me to be
sucked into the author’s world and fall in love with it. Miss Lee grabbed me by
the collar and placed me firmly on the dusty street outside Boo Radley’s
creaky, old house with Scout, Jem and Dill. She captured the setting with such
skill that I could not only see the house, but smell the heat and feel the
slight give of the rotting floorboards of the front porch. I can only recall
one other title that made me suffer the stupefying humidity of the southern USA
in the same way as this: Fevre Dream by George R.R. Martin. Although his title
is an entirely different genre, they both share a slow, meandering path that
reminds me of the Southern drawl and the winding of the great Mississippi. They
both capture the essence of Southern gentility, which is made more striking by
the casual cruelty and racism on show. However, whereas Mr Martin’s cruelest
characters are vampires, in Scout’s story the cruelty is even more shocking
because it is perpetrated by supposedly ‘normal’ people.

Scout
herself is a wonderful narrator, full of the casual judgment and total
confidence of the very young. She is appalled by the education system, which
seems to be designed to reduce all the children to tears of boredom, and highly
indignant that her father is criticized for encouraging her to read. I probably
find Scout so relatable because I recognize my younger self in her a great
deal. She is forthright and head-strong, mistakenly supposing that her family is
‘normal’. She struggles to understand why people are dishonest or cruel and she
often speaks without first thinking through all the possible meanings of a
situation. As a child with chronic ‘foot-in-mouth’ disease, I found this very,
very familiar: if there was ever anything that my parents would pray that we
would not comment upon you could guarantee that I would open my big mouth and
embarrass us all! Now in my forties I am slightly better at remembering to
think first, but I still share Scout’s bewilderment at the workings of the
world.

While
many words have been written about the wonderful writing, setting, plotting and
characters that comprise this title, it is the central theme of racism that has
surely provoked the most debate. Presumably written in the 1950s, the book was
published before the Civil Rights Movement had gained more equality for
African-Americans and when racism was still an open and established way of
life. As a Brit, this is one aspect of American culture that I find the most
different from my own life experiences. This is not to say that there is no
racism in the UK: I was subjected to anti-English prejudice when I worked in
Scotland. The British automatically judge people based upon their regional
accent, skin color or national origin because Xenophobia is part of the human
condition and is, therefore, present the world over. However, the issue of
slavery does not have the same impact on British culture, mainly because slaves were not held in the British Isles themselves. They were owned by the very
wealthy and worked on plantations in other parts of the Empire, so the majority
of British people had never even seen a slave. However, as several people point
out to Scout, even the lowest of the low in the South have someone to look down
upon: the subhuman ex-slaves. This places African-Americans in a uniquely
derided position, as we see when Scout’s teacher sympathizes with the German
persecution of the Jews.

Depressingly,
I have heard perfectly nice people say things that sound terribly similar to
some of the views expressed in this book. Some say that “Racism is dead” in the
US, but that is not my experience and I believe that refusing to acknowledge
its continued existence is massively counterproductive. One only needs to look
at how disrespectful some people have been to President Obama to see how much
prejudice still needs to be overcome. Unfortunately, we still see incidents that remind us
that a man can be considered guilty simply because of the color of his skin,
just like Tom Robinson.